Unacknowledged Permissivism

Abstract

Permissivism is the view that a single body of evidence can sometimes rationalize incompatible doxastic attitudes – for example, suspension of judgment and belief – toward some hypothesis. Impermissivism, by contrast, is the view that there is at most one rational doxastic response to the evidence. This dissertation argues that rationality is permissive, but in an unexpected way: cases in which a body of evidence rationalizes multiple, incompatible responses are possible, but subjects who are in such a case can never rationally believe that they are. This view has sometimes been referred to as unacknowledged permissivism. Unacknowledged permissivism is often said to be implausible. The orthodox view is that it is an unmotivated view, in part because it is said to break ties with the core motivation for defending permissivism in the first place – namely, our intuitions about cases describing disagreement between peers. I challenge the dominant view, arguing that, contrary to what has been assumed, our intuitions about these cases are compatible with unacknowledged permissivism. I also provide a positive argument for unacknowledged permissivism. I argue for a requirement of rationality that prohibits a subject from believing some proposition P while also believing that an incompatible attitude toward P is rational, given his or her evidence. A subject who believes such a conjunction is committed to a kind of intrapersonal incoherence that, in other cases, is obviously rationally problematic. If this is correct, there is a compelling case for the conclusion that believing one is in a permissive case is rationally prohibited. This, combined with the theoretical implausibility of impermissivism, constitutes a strong case for unacknowledged permissivism.Ph.D